Review by Suzie Toumeh
Trigger Warnings from Reviewer?
Drowning, death of a child (implied), gun violence, blood, traumatic memory recall
Age Recommendation from Reviewer?
+14
Technicality Level
Beginner-friendly VR Film.
📖 Plot Summary
A young woman walks through an unnamed European city. She enters a small halal shop and buys a few grams of saffron that remind her of ghost-like figures embracing her. Back in her apartment, she begins to cook. The mundane sounds of chopping and boiling water trigger a cascade of memory as the room fills with blood and she is submerged in a red sea. We glimpse her father being shot, a child in a boat with her wearing a red hat with a photograph in hand. When she resurfaces into the present, she holds the red hat. The film closes on a stunning image: her apartment, a tiny illuminated cube floating among countless others in the night city... one small vessel of grief in a vast, anonymous world.
📖 In This Review
Less Than 5 gr of Saffron is in its core a story about weight you can hold but barely feel. You could hold 5g of Saffron in your palm and barely feel a thing. You could cook with it and never know it was there. It is much like the weight of memory. The weight of a family that exists now as photographs and hugs you can feel but not hold. It is the weight of a single life story floating in a tiny cube above a city full of other cubes, other lives, other weights we walk past every single day without knowing.
This experience takes something enormous: displacement, trauma, grief, survival and places it in the smallest, most ordinary things. A shop. A spice. A kitchen. The sound of water boiling.
While this experience is a VR piece, you don't have any agency in the interactive sense. You don't have a role that the story acknowledges. But, it is still possible to ask "what does this VR piece want from you?" or "who are you?... sitting there alone (in public if in a film festival), watching this woman move through her day?"
Here's what I felt: I was just present in the way you're present when a friend is telling you something hard and you don't interrupt but just listen.
That's who you are in Less Than 5 gr of Saffron. You are someone who has been invited into the most intimate spaces of another person's life: her city, her shop, her kitchen, her memory. And the invitation comes with an unspoken rule: just be here. That's enough.
Let me tell you about the moment I knew I was in an experince that really understood trauma:
The protagonist was in the kitchen. And then the room began to be filled with blood. Here's what the design did that was brilliant: they took away all exits and grounded the viewer in the protagonists place. Fixed there. No escape as the blood rises to fill the room completely, and the viewer goes under with her whether you are ready or not.
In other moments, the design trusted the viewer more like when the child on the boat had no arrows pointing at them. you had to look around to see his red hat. Your eyes finds them in a crowd... The camera stopped saying "look here... see only this..." and trusted the viewer to find the child.
This experince's world constructs two opposing logics that ultimately collapse into one another.
The city itself is rendered without landmarks, without "identifiable" architecture. By stripping away the signifiers of a particular place (no Dam Square, no canals, no cathedral) the world-builder creates "any city" with post-war apartment blocks, a corner shop, the repetition of windows and doors. It's no city in particular and therefore, paradoxically, it becomes every city. The anonymity is a choice.
But then the shop window appears. And on it, words and names: like "halal" and "Lebanon." This is a surface that carries the trace of another specific place beneath the present current random one. The shop is the coordinations that tells us the distance of a "faraway" geography from "here."
The apartment functions similarly to the city at first... it's a generic European flat. Small kitchen, modest counters, the ordinary domestic. But when the memory emerges, the walls don't disappear. They contain the blood, and the blood doesn't come from outside but rises from "within." The space becomes a vessel for the protagnoists "faraway" interiority. And then the final shot pulls us back to see her flat as one cube among others floating in this city. This is the reveal of the identical building systems with same window proportions where the cubes are containers and inside those containers less than five grams of saffron can hold an entire world.
Trauma in Less Than 5 gr of Saffron doesn't live in explosions and screaming. It lives in the everyday. So we hear the knife choping onions. Tap tap tap. The sound of water coming to a boil. These are the sounds of home. Of making a meal, continuing a tradition, connecting to her parents through the simple act of cooking. As the water boils it becomes the sea. The sea she crossed. The designers didn't add thunder or chaos. They let the water keep boiling, the same way it always does. And that's what makes it devastating. Because she hears it differently. And now, because we're in her kitchen, in her memory, in her body, we hear it differently too.
So here we are. Eight-ish minutes later. The headset is off. Less Than 5 gr of Saffron is about what we carry that no one sees. About the ordinary moments that hold everything. About the cubes we live in, floating alongside cubes we'll never see the true interior of. And here's the question it inspires: How might you start paying attention to the cubes floating right next to you?
Reviewer: Suzie Toumeh
Suzie holds two Master’s degrees: in Media Studies from Utrecht University and English Studies from the University of Szeged. She has served on two film festival juries, including the prestigious European University Film Award.💡 Want More Deep Dives on Film & Art?
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